SMI: Cinema & Outdoor Continue To Shine In Market Down 1.6% Overall

Guideline SMI has has revealed that the Australian ad market has ended the year in a “stable position” with total ad spending down by 1.6 per cent from 2023’s record total.

Outdoor and Cinema continue to see the largest growth in the industry, recording 14.2 per cent and 22.3 per cent spend increases, respectively.

Digital video spend has also continued to grow at 7.7 per cent. However, TV spend dropped 4.8 per cent.

“Outdoor is clearly the media of the moment as it’s delivered record levels of ad spend for the June month, the second quarter, the calendar year-to-date and financial year periods,” said Guideline SMI MD Jane Ractliffe.

“And if you view Guideline’s ad spend data over a longer-term period, you’ll see the market is now up 4.5% on the pre-COVID financial year and that represents an extra $376 million of ad spend that’s come into the Australian media economy since that time,’’ she added.

“But obviously the composition of media shares has changed considerably over these years with Digital now representing close to 40 per cent of all ad spend and Outdoor hitting 15 per cent of all ad bookings in the last financial year.”

From a brand-level perspective, the biggest trend in June was a huge boost in ad spend from Streaming TV companies while at the same time, Online Media groups reduced their ad spend by a similar amount. How much of this can be attributed to Nine and Stan’s Olympics coverage remains to be seen.

This ongoing decline in Online Media ad spend was also a key contributor to the lower June quarter ad spend, with that total back 2.4 per cent despite stronger demand for Outdoor, Streaming TV, Regional Radio and Press.

But given the smaller decline in the first quarter so far in 2024 total ad spend across the January to June period is back a lesser 1.6 per cent.